Road to forgiveness

Hello! 

How are you? I hope you're fine and in good health. Today I'm back with another blog Road to Forgiveness.

So before we move on I'd love to tell you an incident which happened with me, 2 days before.
Now as the conditions are starting to become normal, colleges have started to freely function and so did mine.  So every morning I travel by bus to my college and I love that journey. Since my childhood I've been that wanderlust person, who enjoys the journey be it by bus, or any other transport, especially in the mornings. There are lesser people out there and sun is just leaving it's home. It's just so beautiful!
So I was clicking the pictures from the window (offcourse I'm a window seat person :) ) as the bus stopped at a place. A lady climbed in at that stop, and then as she was planning to sit near me there was a speed breaker so the lady trembled and she accidentally dropped my bag which was kept on that seat, in an attempt to handover it to me. When I understood this I got irked because I had kept my project in my bag which got ruined a bit. The lady immediately apologised for the mistake and I forgave her and said it's ok.

             Today as I was writing this blog I was thinking about the event happened. And I wondered how did I forgive her so easily and I know you too have wondered on the thought of how easily we forgive some stranger, at some point in life.

             Why it is easier to forgive a stranger than it is to forgive someone who we knew, loved and respected? And I realized pain amplifies itself and it is directly proportional to how close we were to this person and forgiveness- it is inversely proportional.
In simple terms, the more close we are to the person the more difficult it is to forgive him/her.

Perhaps I realized it’s more to do with the expectations? The closer we are, the more expectations we have, and hence the more we trust the person to not hurt us.

 
Or perhaps it’s to do with how much we think they know us. Despite knowing us, who we are, knowing what hurts us, our vulnerabilities, they chose to do this to us. It almost seems intentional and personal. And when it feels personal, it is definitely not something easy to let go.

 
           I think it’s safe to say that we consciously or subconsciously ponder over these three aspects before we decide who to forgive:
1. Intent — Was it intentional? Was the person really trying to hurt me or was I caught in the crossfire? Why did they do it to me? Is their reason good enough to be forgiven?
2. Repetition — Has the person tried to cause harm to me before? Why is it easier for them to hurt me again?
3. Accountability — Would they learn a lesson if I forgive them? Is their apology genuine enough or just another tactic?

More often than not, we get caught in the rigmarole of negative emotions - resentment, anger and hurt, that makes it even harder for us to forgive. However natural these emotions, they can cause us to get stuck in the past and refuse to allow us to live in the moment. The negativity can weigh us down a lot more than we can imagine, affecting every aspect of our lives and causing us to become into a bitter person.
So, to understand the road to forgiveness we first have to gain a new perspective towards forgiveness.Many times we make some pictures in our head regarding a particular thing/concept which makes it harder to see it's another side.

So, let's understand the another side of forgiveness.

1. Forgiveness isn’t a compromise or a sacrifice like the way we think it is. Perhaps, forgiving someone doesn’t equal to ‘accepting defeat’, but rather choosing not to fight this exhausting game that is burning us out in the process. We forgive them knowing they wronged us, they hurted us but forgiveness means valuing our happiness over our pride.

2.Choosing to forgive doesn’t undo the past or invalidate your pain. Perhaps, it only changes the way you look back at the experience- with compassion.
You accept that you were wronged, you accept your weakness of not standing up for yourself. And once you have made peace with your pain, you forgive yourself first and then them.

3. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you free someone of the consequences of their choices rather it is realising that they acted from a place of weakness or fear or insecurity. We understand what they did was maybe something they thought was the best way to handle that situation. Their apology means they know better now and would act differently if the situation repeats itself.

4. Forgiveness isn’t permitting someone to hurt us again Some people are very difficult to forgive and a representation of everything we hate. We let their actions affect us far too long. And yet years later, what hurts us is not the people themselves, but our interpretations of them. Let us stop narrowing people to boxes of good and bad, rather look at everyone as an individual fighting their own battle. You don’t have to understand or agree to their choices, you can walk away from them. And sometimes it’s okay to forgive people without letting them back into your life.

5. Forgiveness doesn’t come from the place of weakness. It infact comes from a place of strength and compassion. Compassion is in knowing and believing that people are capable of changing, and that they are doing their best to be better.

Forgiveness is a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness or not.

Forgiveness is a choice that seems difficult, yet something that could be gratifying and very rewarding.

Forgiveness is telling yourself “yes, they messed up big, but I’m going to let it go.”

So I hope this blog help you gain a newer perspective in your life towards forgiveness.

Thank you!
~Kshitija